iplined by
education, and exposed to the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in
England, began to be fearfully disordered. The story of the struggle is
told in Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_.

In outward things he soon became a strict Pharisee. He was constant in
attendance at prayers and sermons. His favourite amusements were, one after
another, relinquished, though not without many painful struggles. In the
middle of a game at tipcat he paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with
his stick in his hand. He had heard a voice asking him whether he would
leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he
had seen an awful countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice
of bell-ringing he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the
church tower and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the
thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple
would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To
give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months
elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with his darling sin. When this
last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by the maxims of that
austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as an eminently pious
youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever. Having nothing more to
do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures
to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished,
he began to apprehend that he lay under some special malediction; and he
was tormented by a succession of fantasies which seemed likely to drive him
to suicide or to Bedlam. At one time he took it into his head that all
persons of Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he
partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father,
who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a Jew. At another time
Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have not faith, I am lost;
if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was tempted to cry to the puddles
between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry," and to stake his eternal hopes on
the event. Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and
the neighbouring villages was past; that all who were to be saved in that
part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray and
strive some months too late. Then he was harassed by dou